


Voices Never Share

by awaytobeunshaken



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Don’t copy to another site, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 17:21:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20261737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awaytobeunshaken/pseuds/awaytobeunshaken
Summary: A nighttime visitor brings up old memories for Katrina Cornwell, even as she's been struggling to put the past behind her.





	Voices Never Share

**Author's Note:**

> Set somewhere between 2x09 and 2x12

The door chime buzzed.  _ Damn.  _ She’d just gotten comfortable. She could have just asked the computer to handle it, but she’d gotten in the habit of answering her door the old-fashioned way during the war. It was proving to be a difficult habit to break.

“Admiral.” The door slid open to reveal Jett Reno standing in the corridor. “You settling in okay? Anything you need?” 

“Admiral?” Katrina raised an eyebrow. “Since when do you bother with formalities?” 

“When I’m making excuses to catch up with a friend.” Jett eyed her with a most  _ in _ formal smirk until Kat stepped aside to let her enter. “I wouldn’t have expected to run into you on this tin can. Don’t you have a flagship somewhere?”

“Speak for yourself. You were more than entitled to some leave after Discovery plucked you off of that asteroid. You could have gone home for awhile.” It was easy to fall back into old habits with Jett, the familiar banter. Almost as easy as... no. She wasn’t going to let herself think about Gabriel, or at least the man she’d thought was Gabriel. 

“Home?” she snorted. “What would that even mean? It’s not a place; I’ve been living on one starship or another for the last twenty years. Not a person anymore, either.”

“I never got the chance to tell you how sorry I was...”   


“Don’t.” Jett sat on the couch, one foot on the coffee table, eyes fixed on her knee. “You don’t think I had enough time to feel it on my own? Keeping those people alive down on that wreck was all I had to keep me from feeling it all the time. That chance that at least someone else, someday, might get the best news of their life? It’s probably the reason I’m here right now.”

“Jett.” Kat put a hand on her shoulder. “Is everything okay?”

Jett shrugged the hand away. “I didn’t come here to talk shop. But yeah, it’s better, being here. I think harassing Mushroom Boy is good for the soul.” She frowned. “I mean, when you only have yourself for company, you think about things, y’know? The decisions you’ve made? The roads you never went down? I miss Maesyn; I guess I always will. But I thought about you sometimes, too.” She reached up, tucking Kat’s hair behind her ear as her hand trailed down Kat’s face.

Kat pulled the hand away, but didn’t let go; not yet. “That was a long time ago. We were different people then; we can’t just go back. That’s not a mistake I’m going to make again.”

“Lorca?” Kat nodded. “What happened, exactly? All the gossip on this ship, yet no one’ll breathe a word about its former captain.”

“It’s classified. And for good reason.” It was an easy excuse to make. This was exactly the kind of scenario they’d worried about, after all, should word of the Mirror universe get out.

“I was always in awe of you, you know. The way you knew what you wanted. And you got it.”

“So did you.”

“Yeah,” Jett chuckled. “Guess we just wanted different things. And deep down, I knew that. Made it easier, in a way.”

No, Jett was far too pragmatic to try to fly off to another universe in search of a woman who looked like her wife, but wasn’t. The truth was, Katrina was still ashamed. Even without knowing who he really was, she should have known better than to  _ sleep with him _ . In fact, she did know better. But she’d still had a soft spot for Gabriel, enough of one to let her ignore that voice telling her  _ No.  _

“Well, thanks for the chat. It was nice, catching up.” She kept her eyes fixed on the door for a long moment after Jett walked through it, before grabbing her PADD from the table in a vain attempt to distract herself. 

She couldn’t afford to have soft spots anymore.


End file.
